Ford cutting production in North America

If you’re a major automobile manufacturer and you are struggling to sell all the cars you make, what do you do? Do you try new incentives, aggressive marketing, or actually making cars people want? If you’re Ford, you don’t do any of that. Instead, you just make fewer cars.

Ford has cut production levels of their vehicles in the fourth quarter of this year by 21% compared to last year. That means that there will be 168,000 fewer new Fords on the road this year. Will the world survive?

They will also reduce their third quarter levels by 20,000 from what they previously announced. It means that Ford will make 3.048 million vehicles, 1.134 million of them cars: in North America in 2006, that represents a drop of 9% from last year.

The reductions will affect models in every category, though they will reportedly reflect an anticipated slowdown of sales of trucks and SUVs because of the extortion happening at the gas pumps these days.